Off the Grid
by Three Sickles Short
Summary: Ruth visits a grave and shares some news.  R/H.  Set after Series 8 and contains major spoilers for that series.  Rated M-probably overcautiously-for "adult themes."


_Author's Note: This is my first Spooks fic. As an American viewer, I have only seen through Series 8, and this story is my little fantasy for developments in Series 9. (I've tried to avoid spoilers, but I've seen enough to know that "fantasy" is the right word. Alas.) The characters belong not to me but to the BBC. I've rated the story M, which is probably overkill, but there is discussion of death, and there are references to sex, and better to rate too high than too low. There may be more chapters (if I get over the cognitive dissonance of writing __**Spooks fic**__, for god's sake), and I'm going with the title _Off the Grid_ both because it's general enough to cover what I have in mind for later chapters and because I can't *believe* no one has used it already, and, now that I've thought of it, I have to snatch it up before it gets taken. Anyway, enough rambling. On with the show…._

_P.S. Thanks to Symphony in Blue for clueing me in to Ruth's birthplace. Go read her stories next!_

Chapter 1: In the Churchyard

It's been a while since Ruth came to the country. She is a Londoner (by temperament if not by birth), and, though she loved Polis, she tends to get uneasy after too much time away from tall buildings and crowded streets. But today she has a job to do, so she has ventured into the countryside. Not that this corner of Sussex is really countryside, not properly, but the green, rolling hills and open spaces are close enough for Ruth.

Finding out where Jo is buried was simple enough, especially for someone with Ruth's snooping skills. Mapping out the route—Tube, trains, a short walk down a winding lane—was easy, too. But now that she's here, Ruth feels a bit … not foolish, exactly, but superfluous. To all the dead in this otherwise empty churchyard, her living presence must seem pointless. More precisely, her living presence must not seem anything. For them, there is no seeming. They're dead.

But Ruth has to talk to someone, has to share her joy with someone besides the man who is its cause, and she can think of no one she'd rather tell than Jo, who would be so happy for them. So she mentally shelves her feeling of unreality, settles on the ground beside the granite headstone, and begins to speak.

"Hello, Jo. Sorry I didn't come sooner. I didn't want to intrude—your parents were quite firm about a private funeral, and I didn't want to run into them here. I told myself it was for them, that I didn't want to make them face anyone from the part of your life that caused your death, but it was really for me, too. I couldn't face them. None of us could.

"Enough of that, though. I came now because I have news. I'm not ready to share it with anyone else, but I wanted to tell you—it's too wonderful to keep to myself.

"Harry and I … well, we're together. As of this weekend. Ros's death … it changed something. I think we both knew it right away, but we weren't ready to face it, so we danced around it for a couple of weeks. But then Friday he asked me out for a drink, and …."

Ruth has been talking in fast little bursts, and now she breaks off, feeling the color rise in her cheeks as she thinks of what happened after the drinks. _The kiss in the pub, the clapping and good-natured cat-calls from the other patrons. The urgent embrace in the street. The cab ride to Harry's, the air practically crackling between them as they willed the driver to go faster, to get them there sooner. Harry closing the door, locking it. Pinning him to the door with a kiss the instant he turns to face her. The couch. His lips and tongue and hands and skin and_

Dead though Jo may be, Ruth still isn't going to tell her about _that_.

"It's wonderful, Jo. And … unexpected. Or not that, exactly … 'unexpected' implies that I had expectations, and I never really…. I never let myself have expectations. Surprising, let's say. In a good way."

The passion was no surprise; she could have predicted it, if she had ever allowed herself the luxury of prediction and speculation. Anyone with the iron self-control that Harry has cultivated obviously has passions that require controlling. And the gentleness and tenderness were also things she could have foreseen. What had surprised her was his playfulness. She should have expected it from the wicked glint in his eye, the insufferably knowing half-smile, the razor-edged wit that he liked to inflict on people who didn't come up to the mark. But his playfulness had surprised her, just as her assertiveness had surprised him. Pleasant surprises for both of them. She hopes they never stop surprising each other.

_They're doing the washing-up after breakfast on Sunday (he washing, she drying) when she says, apropos of nothing, "You have a knighthood."_

"_Still," he agrees. "But a certain … responsiveness to stimuli that I've observed in you over the past few days has convinced me that you are very far from dead." _

_Though she's glad he holds no grudge over her rather tart response to that question about their "status," she can't allow his infuriating smirk to pass uncorrected, so she swats him lightly with the drying cloth. "That isn't the point." _

_He raises his eyebrows as if to ask, "Was there a point?" and she swats him again. "The __**point**__," she continues, with exaggerated patience, "is that I have spent the entire weekend having it off with a knight of the realm."_

_At this revelation, Harry laughs so hard that he has a coughing fit. Once he recovers himself, he says, "If the words 'and all I got was this lousy tee shirt' are about to make an appearance, I will be most displeased." _

_Now it's Ruth's turn to laugh. "Hadn't occurred to me. Though now you suggest it…."_

_Harry shakes his head, mock-sorrowful. "You only want me for my title."_

"_Not __**only**__ for your title," she says. "Though as titles go, it's by far the best. Having it off with a duke or an earl is … mercenary. Far too Regency Romance. But a __**knight**__ … that's …." She trails off and waves her hands, looking for the word. _

"_Arthurian?" he offers, taking a step closer to her. "Heroic?" Another step. "Mythic?" One more step so that now there is no space left between them. He leans in close and drawls slowly into her ear, "Legendary?"_

_She drops the drying cloth to put her arms around him and kiss him. When they break off, she nuzzles against his neck and says, "Knights are meant to very good with their swords." _

_He laughs a quiet, throaty chuckle and pulls her even closer. "And good in the saddle." After a pause, he adds, "I think I have one. A saddle. Out in the garden shed."_

"_That does suggest possibilities," she says. "Though the best knights are meant to ride bareback…."_

Ruth isn't telling Jo about that, either.

"Anyway, it's the early days, and I think we're both still terrified of doing something to make a hash of things, so we aren't ready to tell people yet. If you were still here, I doubt I'd tell you. But you'd probably figure it out on your own."

Her current set of colleagues, she knows, will never figure it out on their own. Catch Tariq starting a pool on them. Before … everything (by which she means before she left), she'd have been relieved at the privacy, but now she finds it a bit lonely. Just the two of them.

_They lie in his bed, their heart rates slowed to normal, the sweat mostly dry on their still-flushed skin. Her head is on his shoulder, and he's running a hand lazily, possessively up and down her side. He puts his other hand under her chin and turns her face up to his. "All right?" he asks._

"_All right," she agrees. She reaches up to trace his cheek. "Better than all right," she amends, and she feels his smile against her hand. _

Just the two of them is mostly enough.

_It will be another three weeks before they go public. One of their assets will be killed in the street (again), and Harry will blame himself (again), and he and Ruth will end up talking things over on the roof (again), where he will insist that it's the wind making his eyes water (again). But this time she will put her arms around him and bury her head in his shoulder, knowing that the best way to comfort him is to let him pretend that he's comforting her. They'll stand there for a while, letting all the threads of plots and intrigue spin unattended for the few minutes that they can spare. Then Harry will pull back, briefly touch his forehead to hers, and say, "Thank you, Ruth." And they will go back inside to take up the reins again. As they walk down the steps, maybe he will take her hand, or maybe she will take his. Either way, they'll walk onto the Grid holding hands. _

Ruth doesn't know any of this now. She knows the taste of Harry's skin, the warm strength of his hands, the softness of his hair against her cheek—knows these things as both memories and promises. She knows the blue of the sky, cloudless for once today, and the green of the well-tended grass that covers the grave of a woman who died too young. She knows that this woman is gone, that no shade remains to hear, and that she, Ruth, is talking to herself, not to Jo, as she pours out her heart in this empty churchyard.

At least, most of her knows. But a tiny, all-but-unacknowledged corner of her believes that Jo will hear, and that she will spread the word through the shadowy afterlife granted to agents when they die. Jo will tell Zaf and Adam (and poor Ben, dead before Ruth ever got the chance to meet him). Adam will tell Fiona and Ros, and somehow word will get to Danny and Colin, who will probably be surprised; they died before the spark between Harry and Ruth caught fire. No one will tell Connie, but she'll find out, and she'll do shadowy afterlife research on Ruth and decide that Ruth really isn't good enough for Harry (because despite all her betrayals, Connie did, in her way, love Harry) but that, as long as he's happy, she supposes it's acceptable. And some day, long in the future (please god let it be long in the future), Harry and Ruth will join them, and someone—probably Adam, but maybe Jo—will ask what took them so long. And maybe by then they'll have an answer.

It's fantasy, she knows. But even now, when reality is so inexpressibly wonderful, Ruth needs a little bit of fantasy to counteract the horrors that her job too often brings. All of them gone, all by violence, all ripped out in the middle of things. So much sacrifice. So much waste.

"I miss you," she says. "All of you, but you especially. I hope you're somewhere safe and peaceful.

"And I wanted you to know."

There's more she could say—death always leaves us with more to say—but the shadows are starting to lengthen, and she knows that it's time to go. She stands up and rests her hand against the headstone for a long moment. Then she turns to take the path to the station, where the train will take her back to life, and to London, and to Harry.


End file.
